Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (28 page)

I was rooming—or rather, dividing a capacious suite in Massachusetts Hall—with the editor of the
Crimson.
He was a wag. He was a dog. I was a cat. But that dog and this cat shared a sense of the absurd and I still remember him with affection. We were grand, budding terrorists. I showed him how to convert all our cotton underclothes into guncotton; how to fill our housemaster’s bathroom—bowl, tub, sink—with Jell-O when he was out courting and the icy winter air could come in through the opened bathroom windows and set it for his sleepy return; how to string out underwear on a cotton clothesline converted into guncotton and with the tip of a lighted cigarette make it disappear with a flash behind the back of one of the campus cops when he came up red-faced to arrest us for hanging our laundry in the Yard. It was my grandfather, by the way, who had taught me to make guncotton out of my underwear—also how to make an extremely unstable explosive out of ammonia, potassium iodide, and iodine—and so helped me on my way out of my freshman year at Harvard.

I remember having a tin full of aluminum powder dropped down the chimney from the roof of Massachusetts Hall while I waited in our ground-floor apartment with a match to light it, sending a flame one hundred feet high into the night sky over Cambridge. The list of tomfoolery is long and I could go on. Most of my inventive powers were occupied in such nonsense that first term.

And then, I got the ax. Suddenly I was a totally defeated young man. I never expected to see any of my family or friends again. I was dazed—literally frightened out of my wits. No future that I could see was open to me. I was finished. Honor, Family—such things were important to me then. Who thinks of Shame today?

Pride—some say satanic pride—has been one of the keys to my whole life, and in 1938 it had a great deal to do with my not seeking the advice from my family that I might easily have found, had I only been able to seek it. But the essence of pride is that it never asks for anything, can never admit weakness. It may demand, it cannot beg. In fact, great pride never even thinks of asking! I am positive that it never even occurred to me that anyone might be able to help me.

My father’s reaction was—predictably, and he was right—that I had “absconded with funds.” I had taken with me eight hundred and fifty dollars in cash, all I had in account with the bursar, which my father had given me to study biochemistry and not for gallivanting out to the West Coast, which is where I decided to go.

I took a Greyhound bus from Cambridge to San Francisco. I stopped off in New York to say goodbye to my mother, who lived in Turtle Bay, and my sister, then eighteen. I did not reveal to my mother that I was leaving “forever” but I did to my sister, who then did an impulsive and generous thing—she gave me a small necklace of cultured pearls.

In San Francisco I lived first on Howard Street. I had discovered Jack London, and I soon began exploring Pacific and Montgomery streets—the famous Monkey Block where Saroyan lived. I had never heard of him and drank with him at the Black Cat without knowing who he was. We remembered it all together in Paris many years later when we went to Longchamps and Auteuil to lose our money on the ponies and spent nights drunkenly with Jim and Gloria Jones. At that time the Black Cat was the hangout of striptease girls and whores. It was a tough neighborhood. I could hardly take in the education I was getting, it was coming in so fast, but my ears were as long as a donkey’s and my eyes were out on stalks.

I met a lot of extraordinary characters out there—truly Saroyan’s world and Steinbeck’s. Those two didn’t come from nowhere, you know—like all writers, they were just writing what was, and that
is
the way it was in those days.

I could add a lot of stories to theirs. The Duke. “The Duke of Market Street,” he was called. A famous fixture in San Francisco. He was the King of the Bums. His only possessions were a magnificent Capehart record changer, the first word in hi-fi almost before hi-fi began, and every opera and symphony that had ever been recorded—this in a fleabag that he shared with a Norwegian sailor who was always out to sea.

He did not want me to become a bum like him. He found me a job as a trainee doing analytical chemistry for a paint company. And then several things happened quickly. One day I received a letter from an acquaintance of my father’s, Colonel Frederick Pope, a director of the American Cyanamid Corporation who was also the president of the Chemical Construction Corporation, offering me a job in south-central India assisting two chemical engineers in building a basic chemical complex for the Maharajah of Mysore.

“Duke,” I asked—for I could talk to
this
duke, as I could never have to my father the
Grand
Duke—“what should I do? Should I keep on trying to find a night job that lets me go to school by day, or should I go to Jack London’s Alaska, or should I accept this great panjandrum’s miserable offer of a hundred dollars a month to build a chemical factory somewhere in India?” I was not sure but I suspected that part of the deal was that my father should pay my salary.

He never hesitated. He said, “Make peace with your father and go out to India.”

I was able to do the second.

Dr. W. Lindsay Jacobs

Brooks Baekeland was hostile toward his son and in a welter of confused moralizing seemed to wish him ill, consciously or unconsciously.

He wrote me a letter about Tony, enclosing a cutting from some French magazine. I remember it was a full-page color cartoon made up of three separate sections. The first showed a man sitting quietly in an armchair reading a newspaper. The second showed a little boy pointing a space-ray gun directly at the man, with all sorts of yellow stars shooting out—it looked like the finale of a Fourth of July firecracker display. The last section of the cartoon was just a pile of ashes on the chair. And Brooks Baekeland had written on the side of the cartoon: “Sometimes this frightful realism comes too close to the heart of the thing.”

Brooks Baekeland

In the end—long before the end—I saw Tony as a kind of personification of Evil, and I knew him better than anyone in the world and he knew that I did—as Caliban knew that Prospero knew
him
. But to whom could—would—I have said that? No one. I told him—oh, I told
him.
And he understood. He knew that I loved him, too. And he loved
me
—too much, according to some of his homosexual friends.

Suzanne Taylor

Angel, who cooked for the Baekelands two or three days a week, also came to us two or three days, whenever we were alone—she wasn’t good enough to cook for company—and she used to tell us an awful lot about the Baekelands, naturally. She told me, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to Tony, because when his parents are away he picks up older boys on the street and brings them home.” He was about fourteen then.

Dr. Thomas Maguire

Tony’s first homosexual relationship was at the age of eight.

From a Psychiatric Report on Antony Baekeland ordered by the British Courts, January 5, 1973

Peter Gable

One Christmas break at Avon I came trundling down to New York and I stayed with Tony. His parents were living in Paris most of the time by then but they had this penthouse
pied-à-terre
on Seventy-fifth Street and Lexington, with lots of terraces. It was just kids down for a long weekend. Tony had a party, a little gathering. I remember there were a lot of very cute girls there. Girls appreciated Tony’s looks and his wit or his manner or something—they rather liked him. And he seemed to reciprocate their enthusiasm. I mean, he had, it appeared, as much enthusiasm for girls as anybody else, certainly as much as
I
had. He seemed to be as hotly in pursuit of the almost unachievable piece of ass as any of us. He became attracted to a friend of a cousin of his who I was going out with. God she was a sexy little girl—long brunette hair, curvaceous, quite something to warm the cockles of your heart on a cold winter’s night in a boy’s boarding school in Avon, Connecticut. And this girl and Tony formed some sort of vast friendship for six months or so. Her parents lived somewhere in Connecticut—Westport, Southport, Eastport, Northport—and there was a weekend that we all spent unchaperoned in their house, which I remember as being beamy, with a large fireplace and lots of stone. We built a fire and drank a bottle of Cointreau or something, and then we toddled off to bed. Now these were the years when girls’ knees stayed wired to each other. So neither Tony nor I expected, nor did the girls anticipate, that anything of a particularly prurient nature would transpire. We did end up in the girls’ room, where there were two double beds—Tony and his girl in one and me and my girl in the other, all of us clothed to some degree. And what did we do? We went to sleep!

The point of all this is, we’re now fifteen years old and Tony is pursuing females. Another year or so and I begin to discern that he has something less than a burning interest in them. I’m trying to remember exactly when it was that I decided that Tony was
not
masculine. There was a period there, in his late teens, when I simply felt that he was neuter. It could well be that he was by then actively pursuing homosexuality—I don’t know. As I said, at Avon we basically went our separate ways. But there was this one guy there, Mike Perkins. He was tall, dark, and incredibly handsome, and he was a real sexual enthusiast with women—I mean, I knew many of his girlfriends. But looking back now, I have the feeling that maybe he and Tony were more than friends.

Lines written by Antony Baekeland on the back of a menu from Allen’s, a New York City pub, during his time at Avon Old Farms School, 1963

The Royal drunk laughs again. He will cry once more, but now he laughs. “Why” is the question. Maybe because the Royal drunk is lonely, like everybody. Maybe because the Royal drunk is not really a drunk after all but only a confused seventeen-year-old boy who may be a homosexual but has a feeling he’s not. Maybe the Royal drunk doesn’t know what’s happening around him and only has a very vague feeling of what’s going on
in him.
Maybe the Royal drunk really
is
all the unpleasant things he thinks he is, or maybe he thinks basically that he is the opposite of what he knows he is. The Royal drunk, sober even, has too much insight, and not enough character and the kind of intelligence his parents have, to be happy—at least right now. The Royal drunk is a paradox in every way. He despises bad manners but often is rude himself. He hates false people but is falsity incarnate. He loves his parents, understands them, but finds it impossible to talk to them. Perhaps because they are too highly moral. They would have been much happier and more successful (as would he) if their morality had been a medium between the Royal drunk’s and theirs. The Royal drunk seems cold because of his many emotions. A very strange thing is when your charm ceases and you become gloomy for one reason or another—people cease to understand, when you need understanding the most.

The Royal drunk likes to think, and feel, sometimes, that he is a nice character, but at heart, he knows he’s not, or why would he have done what he’s done. The Royal drunk has been in love with another boy, but somehow it’s been a noble and almost honorable relationship (easy to tear down intellectually but not emotionally). Perhaps the best (really the only) relationship involving love the Royal drunk has had. The Royal drunk wishes, however, that he could start at six again, with brothers and sisters, and perhaps a bit less exigeant [sic] parents, although they were never exigent in the normal sense. The Royal drunk is a very lonely young man—that is why he gets Royally drunk and tries to have a lot of friends. The Royal drunk needs rather desperately to fall in love with someone he likes.

Nancy Perkins Wallace

Tony and my brother Mike ran away from Avon together. They went to Puerto Rico. They were out of school for quite a while. They lived on beaches and that sort of thing. According to my brother, who is
not
homosexual, Tony had male lovers while they were there.

Henry H. Perkins

Mike never told
me
about Tony’s male lovers, you know, but I’m such a butch guy myself, my brother knows I don’t like to hear stories of that stuff. I just remember they had no money, they slept on the beach, and they were bitten by fleas—they held out for a week or something, and then they, you know, came home, like any other little kids that have run away. After that, Mike began getting very involved in Tony’s life, both here and in Europe.

They had airs, those people. Of grandeur. The Baekelands had the French parlor routine. And the salon,
oui.
And Tony had all of that, too, you know, and that’s what I think was somewhat fascinating to my brother. I think that he was somewhat seduced by that.

Duncan Longcope

Tony had an American pal called Mike, quite a nice young man, dark-haired, very handsome as I recall, and they used to do the boulevards together, and according to this woman I knew who used to tell me stories about Tony’s life on the Île Saint-Louis, it was the same thing every night—I mean, either two boys or two girls would come back with them, to this place of Brooks’s that Tony used. Brooks, you know, had that other apartment on the Île, I think it was on the rue Regrattier—a studio where he wrote. And Tony at a certain time had the use of this studio.